Mary Jackson, tribune of the female sex, accuses Heather Mac Donald of seeking male favor by putting down women

I have no particular wish to get into an another disagreement with Mary Jackson at New English Review, whom I do not dislike, but when she triumphantly announces that “Heather Mac Donald shows her true colours on the ‘Campus Rape Myth’” [emphasis added], by which Jackson means that Mac Donald (in a cogent and insightful article at City Journal) is siding with the forces of anti-femalehood by criticizing the feminist ideological construction of “rape” on today’s campuses, all Jackson is doing is showing her own unregenerate, unreconstructed, No-Second-Thoughts, Not-Even-Any-First-Thoughts, knee-jerk, politically correct, leftish feminism, which makes an astonishingly bad fit with Jackson’s conservatism in other areas.

Jackson even says this:

Mac Donald strikes me as another woman who, in Jane Austen’s words, “seek to recommend themselves to the other sex by undervaluing their own”.

Would it be too much to expect Jackson to consider Mac Donald’s clearly stated facts and arguments, rather than making up fantasies about Mac Donald’s hidden motives?

Come on Mary, God gave you a brain. Use it.

I’m rooting for you.

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Mary Jackson writes:

You may have missed my earlier post, and also my article on rape.

In these pieces, I deal with MacDonald’s arguments and other matters in what you may think is a more sensible way. The post you blog about was a response not to MacDonald’s original article, but to a later note, where the tone and manner is far more irritating and smug.

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Ken Hechtman writes:

In the old days, you told your daughters “be good” and your sons “be careful.” Now it’s the other way around.

If I had a son, I’d tell him the law:

“Even if she seemed to be into it a minute ago and then all of a sudden she has this dramatic mood swing and says, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore. I want to get dressed and go home right now,’ you have to let her go. No matter how inconvenient that might be at the moment. If you use force to stop her, the law is not on your side, nor should it be.”

If I had a daughter, I’d tell her the odds:

“No means no, sure, whatever you wear, wherever you go and all the rest of it … But the odds of making your ‘no’ stick are going to be infinitely higher if you say it dressed, sober, standing up and in the hallway. You say ‘no’ any other way, the law is still on your side. But if you’d rather not have to go to the law afterwards you’ll say it this way.”

Adela Gereth writes:

I had already read both of Heather Mac Donald’s articles, “The Campus Rape Myth” and “A Thought Experiment on Campus Rape.” I did not find the latter to be a “self-righteous little diatribe” nor the tone of either to be “irritating and smug.” Mac Donald writes: “Virtually all of these alleged rapes could be avoided if the girls took certain steps: don’t get into bed with a guy when you are very drunk, don’t take off your clothes, don’t get involved in oral sex, and so on. Such advice is fully consistent with female empowerment.” I don’t see anything wrong with that.

“Campus rape” refers to a specific situation as much as to the act itself; thus, avoid the situation and one will likely be able to avoid the act, as well. It’s like saying if you don’t want to be a victim of a purse-snatching, don’t carry a purse in a high crime area. It doesn’t mean that a woman is to blame if she is subjected to a campus rape any more than she is to blame if her purse is snatched while she carries it in a high-crime area. It does mean that as an independent adult, she has the responsibility to take what steps she reasonably can to ensure her own safety.

I saw Heather MacDonald on C-SPAN with Victor Davis Hanson and Steven Malanga when all three discussed the book on immigration they co-authored. Heather MacDonald was direct and no-nonsense. I have seldom seen a woman who appeared less likely, to paraphrase Jane Austen’s words, to “seek to recommend herself to the other sex by undervaluing her own.” Perhaps Mary Jackson is exhibiting a no less typically feminine response at the knowledge that another woman has had not one but two men willing to be her co-authors?

James P. writes:

Adela Gereth writes: “It’s like saying if you don’t want to be a victim of a purse-snatching, don’t carry a purse in a high crime area. It doesn’t mean that a woman is to blame if she is subjected to a campus rape any more than she is to blame if her purse is snatched while she carries it in a high-crime area. It does mean that as an independent adult, she has the responsibility to take what steps she reasonably can to ensure her own safety.”

Yet this common-sense argument is precisely what Mary Jackson and Esmerelda Weatherwax emphatically reject in the comments section of that Iconoclast post. In their view, if women avoid sexually risky situations like those Heather MacDonald describes (don’t get into bed with a guy when you are very drunk, don’t take off your clothes, don’t get involved in oral sex, etc) this is tantamount to imposing sharia law and requiring all women to stay home clad in a burqa. The “logic” is just bizarre.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 05, 2008 11:03 PM | Send